With Everything I Am (The Three #2)(35)

“I take you down the mountain, I put you in your house, I take away your guard, you’ll be kidnapped and killed within days,” he clipped.

“Seriously,” she muttered scornfully.

“Seriously,” he shot back.

“I –” she started.

“Do you forget what happened three nights ago?” he demanded.

“Of course not!” she snapped.

“The threat is real,” he informed her.

“Only if you didn’t set it up to make me think it was real,” she shot back.

His whole body jerked before he thundered, “Why in f**king hell would I do that?”

“To make me go along with your crazy plan!” she answered.

Callum growled, his head twisted to the side and he bit out, “I should have seized her, taken her to a castle and bedded her. This would have been finished within hours, not f**king days and not with this ridiculous garbage. But no, I listened to you.”

“Don’t drag me into this,” the green-eyed man said, grinning ear-to-ear like their show was enormously amusing.

“Sonia, darlin’,” one of the blue-eyed men was speaking to her and she moved her gaze to his, “what Callum says is true. You’re his queen and you’re under threat.”

“You would say that,” Sonia returned. “He’s brainwashed you. I hate to be the one to tell you this but you’re a member of his cult.”

All of them, including Callum, stared at her like she’d lost her mind.

She didn’t know much about brainwashing but they said brutal interventions were often the way to go when someone was addicted to something, even the charisma of another person so she forged ahead.

Anyway, she was already screwed. She had nothing to lose.

“I don’t blame you,” she went on. “He can be pretty charming and charismatic. Still, he’s not a well man.”

The newcomers all burst out laughing.

Callum scowled at her a moment before dropping his head back and saying to the ceiling, “Bloody hell.”

“Sonia,” the woman called and Sonia looked at her. “Sweetheart, I’m Regan, Callum’s mother.”

Sonia’s mouth dropped open at this news.

She looked like Callum, for certain. But she had to be his sister, not his mother. In fact, she looked even younger than he was.

“What?” Sonia breathed.

Regan came forward. “Let me show you something, sweetheart,” she said softly.

She had a big, designer, leather handbag over her shoulder and from it she pulled a framed photo. When Regan got close to her, she turned the photo to face Sonia. It was a picture of her mother and father’s wedding day.

Standing by her mother was a tall, dignified man who looked like every man in this room, but most especially Callum. Standing by her father was the woman standing in front of her.

“Holy cow,” she whispered then she looked at the woman who, from the day her parents were married decades ago, to that very day in the cabin, appeared not to have aged a moment and announced the obvious, “Photos can be altered.”

“I’d known Cherise Mayfair Arlington for what seems forever,” Regan declared. “She was a dear friend.”

Oh no. This wasn’t fair.

“Don’t –” Sonia warned.

“She liked pink and dressed you up in it as often as she could,” Regan went on and Sonia’s heart slid up her throat when she heard these words.

“Don’t –” Sonia repeated but that one word sounded choked.

Regan interrupted her, “Lassiter liked blue and he detested pink –”

Sonia cut her off. “This isn’t even nice.”

It wasn’t nice, them using her parents against her.

Though what Regan said was true. Her father was always trying to talk her mother out of dressing her in pink and he was always buying clothes for her that were blue. It was a silly little argument that they bickered about good-naturedly the entire, albeit heartbreakingly short, life she’d led with them in it.

No one could know that from doing research on her.

Sonia had even forgotten it.

“You haven’t aged a day from that picture,” Sonia accused.

Regan took in a breath and replied, “Our people age slowly.”

She could say that again.

Regan moved slightly closer and pressed emotionally deeper. “Every Sunday, Lassiter made you pancakes in the shapes of stars.”

Sonia’s heart clutched.

Now, really. How did she know that?

No one could know that.

Except her father and mother and both of them were dead.

Sonia scuttled back on the bed, whispering, “Stop it.”

Regan’s voice grew sad and fond when she said, “Cherise told me your favorite book was The Giving Tree.”

“Stop.”

“She said she read it to you night after night.”

“Stop.”

“It was the only book you wanted to hear.”

Sonia felt the edge of the bed and halted, staring at the woman.

Her eyes had gone tawny.

And it hit her, belatedly, that that wasn’t natural, eyes that changed like that. No one’s eyes did that. It was one thing for the hue to change, say, if you were wearing a certain color. But for the color to change completely? To that attractive but inexplicable shade which was not from nature or any nature that Sonia knew?